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Personalisation Best Practices Part Three: Leverage Location-Based Strategies
27 August 2019
Raise your hand if this has ever happened to you. You receive a text from your favourite restaurant offering a special meal deal… the day after your visit. It’s so frustrating; that text would have been very useful last night.
Leveraging location-based personalisation strategies is an excellent way to reach your customers when they’re ready to buy. In the third part of our six-part series on improving the customer experience through personalisation, we’ll explore how to use location-based tactics effectively.
What’s Location-Based Personalisation?
Location-based personalisation is the idea that marketers can personalise their messages to customers based on their geographical location. Mobile phones make that possible; apps share user location data with companies. Firms can use that information to craft personalised messaging and push them out through the app.
We’ll use the example from above. Let’s say you go to your favourite restaurant. The minute you walk into the door, you receive a message that you’ll get twenty per cent off your appetiser. You’re already happy about being at the restaurant, but this makes your customer experience even better!
Best Practices for Location-Based Personalisation Strategies
How do you go about using location-based personalisation strategies? There are some best practices to follow to make sure that you get the most out of this laser-targeting method:
- Have clear-as-a-bell goals.
- Understand exactly who you want to target.
- Know where your customer is on his or her journey.
- Put the right tools in place to enable location-based personalisation.
Have Clear-as-a-Bell Goals: This best practice should be standard for any project you’re launching, but we’ll say it again anyway: knowing exactly what you want to achieve is a must. You won’t know if location-based personalisation is working if you don’t know what you’re hoping to get out of it.
Is your objective to expand into a new market? Do you want to retain existing customers? Are you aiming to improve your customer experience in general? Formulating your goals before you implement a location-based personalisation strategy that will give you the results you want.
Understand Exactly Who You Want to Target: With location-based personalisation, you can target your customers at a super-granular level. To get the most out of this technology, you have to decide from the outset who you want to reach, because otherwise, you’ll exclude people outside of a particular geographic area.
Think of location-based personalisation as looking into a microscope. You might have several cells on one slide, but the more you adjust the focus, you’ll see fewer objects. Choose carefully which geographic locations to prioritise to maximise your success.
Know Where Your Customer Is on the Journey: When it comes to location-based personalisation, context rules. Where are your customers in the purchase journey? Are they researching? Have they made a decision?
Knowing those details is critical to making the right offer to customers at the right time. A deal is useless to someone if it comes too early or too late. The data you have on your customer can help you determine when the exact right time is to make an offer (as well as what the right offer is).
Put the Right Tools in Place: It’s easier to get location-based personalisation right when you use the best tools for the job. Sitecore, a market-leading customer experience platform, makes personalisation based on location simple.
Sitecore’s IP Geolocation service enables you to:
- Personalise site pages for visitors from various regions.
- Track your goals and events for your page.
- Set business rules for engaging with customers.
- Segment contact lists based on geography.
- Analyse reports.
- Find geolocation details within customer profiles.
Personalise Site Pages for Various Regions: Do you have visitors to your page from more than one region? With Sitecore, it’s easy to tailor content for people who visit your site from multiple locations.
Track Your Goals and Events for Your Page: Sitecore also allows you to track goals and events for your page. Goals are actions you want visitors to take, while events are the actions they have taken. You can configure Sitecore so that when visitors come from different regions and take different actions, those events trigger specific personalised content.
Set Business Rules for Engaging with Customers: Want to send out an email only to customers living in a particular geographic region? You can do that with Sitecore!
In Sitecore, you can set business rules that target customers living in particular areas. Let’s say you only want to send an email to people living in Auckland; all you have to do is set up that rule in Sitecore, and you’re good to go.
Segment Contact Lists Based on Geography: Sitecore also lets you divide your lists based on where your customers’ location. Want to go deeper? Segment your lists based on other attributes including gender, age, and engagement value points.
Analyse Reports: Knowledge is power, and Sitecore puts that strength in your hands by giving you the ability to analyse reports. You can review information about tracked visitor locations. That gives you a better idea about how people from different regions behave on your site.
Find Geolocation Details within Customer Profiles: Sitecore helps you gain a 360-degree view of your customers. With the IP Geolocation Services, you can gain information about the country, city, and their registered company name. That allows you to build an Experience Profile for that customer, which contains data about the interactions that customer has had with your company, his or her preferences, and other useful information about him or her to improve the customer experience.
Enlighten: Helping You Implement Sitecore at Your Company
Enlighten is a proud Sitecore Gold Partner, and we’re experts in implementing Sitecore at companies so that you can get the highest ROI possible. We have over two decades of delivering extraordinary customer experiences. Want to learn more about leveraging location-based personalisation to engage your customers? Contact us.
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